Practices Of Social Movements Research Articles

Prekæritet og prekariat:

This article reviews the theoretical and political history of the concept of precarity, used to describe various forms of insecurities, primarily those related to conditions of labor, employment, and wage. Precarity and the related neologism precariat have recently gained ground in Anglophone intellectual and political discussions. It is the premise of the article that, with an increasingly globalized economy, discussions and movement action based on precarity may be of growing importance in a Danish context. The aim of the article is to show how the history of these concepts has unfolded in sociological discussions and social movement practices since the turn of the century. I begin with the sociological discussion about the concept of the precariat, a class formation based on the conditions and experiences of precarity. I then show how the concept of precarity has a history in activist thought beyond these sociological discussions and how social movements, based on this thought, throughout the 2000s have mobilized around the concept, primarily in the so-called EuroMayDay parades. In the last section, I discuss how the economic crisis has affected social movement practices and how labor unions have begun paying attention to the predicaments of precarity.

Zusammen anders haushalten und Politik machen

The ecological and social problems of our time cannot be solved without a fundamental revision of our consumption style. State institutions struggle to address these problems with effective political means. By establishing collectives dedicated to the sustainable consumption of groceries, citizens make attempts to close this gap locally. Recently, projects have emerged across Italy that make explicit reference to practices of new social movements and publicly and politically challenge and alternate everyday consumption habits. This contribution is based on a discussion of findings from an online survey with members of such local shopping communities in Lombardy.

Regeneration through the ‘Pedagogy of Confrontation’: Exploring the Critical Spatial Practices of Social Movements in Inner City São Paulo as Avenues for Urban Renewal

The city centre of Sao Paulo is increasingly a key site for local housing movements to challenge the rules and practices of spatial injustice in Brazil. In a context where housing for low-income gr...

Monkeywrenching Plain Language: Ecodefense, Ethics, and the Technical Communication of Ecotage

Research problem: Subversive environmental texts, those that strive against hegemonic discourse, such as the book Ecodefense, have a long history of use by radical environmentalists as a means for recruitment and distribution of best practices. This study aims to investigate the role of plain language in the subversive text Ecodefense, and consider some ethical implications of plain language by conducting a close textual analysis. Research questions: (1) Is the subversive text Ecodefense an artifact of plain language? (2) If Ecodefense is written in plain language, what does that suggest about the inherent ethicality of plain language? Literature review: Plain language refers to clear expression designed to help users achieve desired goals. In the sense that it is a communication practice, it is guided by standards put forth by various agencies and bureaucratic bodies. In the sense that it is a movement, plain language is characterized by the proliferation of organizations advocating for plain language practices in society. This study is rooted in the investigation of the ethical practices of social movements. It considers the ethics of plain language practices when they are put toward subversive ends and explores the ethical value of plain language itself. Methodology: Ecodefense is analyzed using the Center for Plain Language's (CPL) Plain Language checklist and Writemark's criteria for documents, which includes consideration of the audience, structure, language content, and design of a text, as well as usability testing. Results and conclusion: Analysis shows that Ecodefense is partially representative of plain language use and practice under the CPL's standards, and appears somewhat more fully representative under Writemark's standards, which are designed for use by a trained assessor. Analysis further suggests that adherence to checklist-driven language practices may unwittingly enable an ethic of exigence; thus, research is needed into the ethical implications for list-driven, or standards-based, rhetoric in order to ensure that plain language practices consider long-term implications for users and for organizations that employ these practices.

Communication, organisation, and action: Theory-building for social movements

This paper addresses the need for new approaches to understand the processes through which communicative interactions create, re-create, and change transnational social movements. It proposes that CCO, the communicative theory of the constitution of organisation, provides useful concepts for analysing the communication practices of social movements in an organisational field dominated by global market integration and supranational governance. The author draws on a case study of La Vía Campesina, a transnational network of over 160 rural peoples’ organisations in more than 70 countries. Through applying the four-flow model of CCO – focused on communicative processes including membership negotiation, organisational self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning – she explores how the global social movement is communicatively constituted and suggests directions for future research.

Rights, citizenship and political struggle

This paper adds a new perspective to recent debates about the political nature of rights through attention to their distinctive role within social movement practices of moral critique and social struggle. The paper proceeds through a critical examination of the Political Constitutionalist theories of rights politics proposed by Jeremy Waldron and Richard Bellamy. While political constitutionalists are correct to argue that rights are ‘contestable’ and require democratic justification, they construe political activity almost exclusively with reference to voting, parties and parliamentary law-making, neglecting the vital role rights play in political struggle outside and against the official institutions of democratic citizenship. In contrast to the political constitutionalist stress on the patient and reciprocal negotiation of rights within formal electoral processes, this paper locates the political nature of rights in their conflictual logic as ‘claims’ in multiple spheres that function to mobilise oppositional support against powerful adversaries and challenge dominant understandings. An activist citizenship of rights is frequently necessary, it argues, given the structural barriers of power and inequality that distort legislative decision-making and lead to the denial of fundamental moral entitlements to less powerful groups. The paper provides an illustration of activist citizenship taken from a contemporary squatting movement centred around the right to housing, Take Back the Land. In exercising the moral right to housing, for which they demand political recognition, through the occupation of vacant buildings, the practices of Take Back the Land reflect the conflictual dimension of rights as claims in keeping with their historical role in empowering subordinate groups to challenge unjust relations of power and inequality.

A New Agenda for International Development Cooperation: Lessons learnt from the Buen Vivir experience

The debate on growth and development that has been going on over the last decades has clearly highlighted a number of flaws and contradictions that the theory, as well as the practice, of International Development Cooperation (IDC) has failed to address in a convincing and effective way. IDC, once the prime tool for promoting a change in the livelihoods of the poorest and most vulnerable, is increasingly under scrutiny and does not seem to have provided an effective response to the current crisis. Buen Vivir (good life), Latin America’s new concept for collective well-being, which has emerged over recent years from the traditional cosmovisions of Andean indigenous peoples and translated into political and institutional practice, offers elements of reflection on economy, environment and social life that are useful for reframing the way ‘well-being’ is conceived within the current development setting: a fresh perspective on the most urgent global concerns is particularly useful as the debate regarding the successors to the Millennium Development Goals post-2015 starts to heat up. The new approach to IDC developed in Ecuador in recent years represents an attempt to put some of these elements into practice. However, beyond the experiences in Latin America, that can claim a closer link, albeit not without tensions, with the indigenous peoples with which the Buen Vivir culture has its roots, these suggestions can show an interesting convergence with alternative views on development emerging from the reflections and practices of Western social movements.

State marionettes, phantom organisations or genuine movements? The paradoxical emergence of rural social movements in post-socialist Russia

Of all the rural social movements in the world, those in post-socialist Russia have been considered to be among the weakest. Nevertheless, triggered by the neo-liberal reforms in the countryside, state attention to agriculture and rising land conflicts, new social movement organisations with a strong political orientation are emerging in Russia today. This sudden burst of civil activity, however, raises questions as to how genuine and independent the emerging organisations are. Our research shows that many rural movements, agricultural associations, farm unions and rural political parties lack constituency, support the status quo and/or are actually counterfeits (what we call ‘phantom movement organisations’). With this analysis, we aim to explain the nature of social movements in the post-Soviet countryside and offer an original contribution to the theory on and practice of rural social movements.

Activist Laboratories of the 1990's

In the 1990s, as the Internet went public, a throng of technological utopianists began declaring the coming of an authentic social, political and democratic revolution. In the reflection of instantaneous, unregulated flows of information and countless self-generating channels of communication, a growing group of pundits saw the promise of an empowered and engaged citizenry that could rewrite the balance of power in society. Breathing life into these quixotic visions, young, white, college-educated men across North America, Europe and Australia flocked to the Internet. These computer programmers-cum-activists took to the Internet with the vision of protecting the non-hierarchical nature of this new communications medium, while harnessing its powers to support a myriad of political organizing projects. In this paper, I look at three of the most critical media activist projects of the 1990s: BURN!, Z Media Institute and CounterMedia and make two interrelated arguments. First is BURN!, then ZMI and CounterMedia, as well as other activist laboratories, were the central sites where the cultural logic and media practices of contemporary social movements began to take shape, particularly as this logic was actualized through technology. Second, I argue that the class position of the new media activists led to a specific understanding of resistance and, correspondingly, the role of technology in social change. Thus, while the activist laboratories of the north created critical new media tools and open, participatory communications platforms, there was a tendency for technology itself to become the answer to social ills.

Informal settlements and urban heritage landscapes in South Africa

Informal urban settlements and trade zones represent an increasingly pressing issue for urban heritage developers. In light of the recent revisitation of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, this article explores the current challenges faced at the intersection of heritage practice, urban planning, and informal communities. Heritage recommendations operate within the domain of soft law and their implementation relies on the voluntarism of public parties and the private sector. Such heritage recommendations are thus rarely taken up outside of city improvement districts with recognizable property-owning stakeholders, commercial infrastructures for security, maintenance, and investor marketing. In South Africa, the particular circumstances of the post-apartheid landscape render urban planning frameworks prone to reinforcing the marginalization of informal stakeholder engagement, ultimately perpetuating a socio-spatial inequality such programs set out to mitigate. The civic practices of new social movements and historical knowledge that emerges from the context of informal and neglected urban environments illustrate emergent answers to the exclusionary dynamics of urban heritage planning.

To Receive Well—It's Critical

This essay explores a non-negationist approach to the “critical” by recounting cultural studies's recent articulation of intellectual work to social movement practice. The academicization of cultural studies is evaluated not as cooptation of criticality, but as subsumption, which creates new platforms for action. Ultimately, Cultural Studies would benefit from its own “reception study” in which its powers to be affected could be enhanced to reconnect it with ongoing popular struggles.

Mobilization and protest: the struggle to save Karura Forest in Nairobi, Kenya

Recent literature in geography and related sciences has sought to demonstrate the role of different forms of spatialities such as space, place, scale and mobility in structuring social movement formations. In so doing, the literature has gone beyond the conventional structural explanations of the development of collective organized resistance. Within this line of scholarship, some have called for the need to go beyond focusing on single positions of spatiality in isolation from others and to address how multiple spatialities, combined, influence the development and practices of social movements. A fuller understanding of how multiple spatialities impact movements must also include consideration of empirical cases beyond the current focus on North American, European and Latin American contexts. This paper, therefore, investigates the development of a loosely organized resistance movement in Kenya and its efforts in the late 1990s to protest against government-sanctioned plans to privatize Karura Forest, a public forest reserve located in the City of Nairobi. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Nairobi between 2005 and 2006, my findings suggest that a combination of spatialities influenced how the movement organized and mobilized the public to participate in the protests.

Introduction

There are four themes that weave their way through the research thread on Mobilisations, Interventions, and Cultural Policy in this issue. First, there is concern with intervention—intervention into the politics and practices of social movements and intervention into the academy and its traditions of knowledge production. Second, each text is situated firmly within a recognition and appreciation of social movements as knowledge producers. Third, all three contributions are unequivocally located in an urban context and the contemporary condition of inhabiting the city. Finally, what emerges from each reflection is a commitment to militant research and practice, as one that keeps ever-present an awareness of the relationship of research to existing material social relations of power and a commitment to confronting and transforming these very relations.

The Animal Rights Movement in Theory and Practice: A Review of the Sociological Literature

AbstractTraditionally, philosophers have had most to say about the ethics of our treatment of non‐human animals (hereafter animals); it is only in recent years that social scientists have engaged with issues concerning humans and other animals. However, in the sociological literature and more generally in the emerging field of Human–Animal Studies (HAS), evidence of interest in the animal protection movement is slight. This review of Eliasian theory, Marxist realism, feminism, ecofeminism, and social constructionist theory – along with key activist approaches to animal activism and advocacy – indicates the theoretical richness of the topic that is nonetheless empirically poor. The animal protection movement is referred to here simply as the animal movement or where appropriate, as one of its three strands – animal welfare, animal liberation and animal rights. The article concludes with a discussion of how social movement theory (the ‘why’) and practice (the ‘how’) might be enhanced by social movement scholars working in collaboration with animal activists.

Por uma conceitualização sociopolítica dos direitos humanos a partir da experiência latino-americana

A conceitualização latino-americana de direitos humanos não deve ser definida apenas em termos jurídicos, mas deve, também, incorporar uma dimensão sociopolítica, uma vez que a maior contribuição da região ao discurso está em sua filosofia de ação e na prática de seus movimentos sociais. Este artigo propõe uma conceitualização que resgate esse legado a partir de uma perspectiva discursiva, particularmente por meio das ideias de genealogia e intertextualidade.

The Quest for Innovative Strategies to Increase Productivity

In this issue of Innovative Higher Education, Adrianna Kezar examines the followingquestion. “What is the best way to achieve broader reach of improved practices in highereducation?” At the outset, she notes that policymakers and the general public increasinglyexpect post-secondary institutions to achieve broad national goals quickly and effectively bythe adoption of programs and practices (often funded) that have been “successful” in anotherplace, a practice known as “scale-up.” In conclusion, she cautions against the use ofsimplistic scale-up models, which basically take a “successful” innovation from a localsetting and then apply it to other places with little consideration for differences in context.Followingthefailureoftop-downapproachestobringaboutdesiredchangesandoutcomes,the idea to “scale-up” caught the interest of grantors, policymakers, and educators. However,the history of scale-up innovations in k-12 is not one of success; in fact, Kezar uses the term“dismal record.” She elaborates that the adopters need to consider the concepts of depth,sustainability, spread, and ownership in order for scaling up to be effective. For change to belong-lasting, educators must attend to rewards, cultural norms, and capacity. In the end, sheconcludes that the lessons and practices of social movements and the concepts of mutualadaptionaremoreappropriateforconsiderationthanthe practicesassociated withscalingupifhighereducationistoachievebroaderadoptionofchange.Kezar’sanalysisoftheexpansionofservice learning from 200 colleges to over 3000 colleges in less than a decade provides usefulinsight for administrators considering the adoption and expansion of innovations.Kezar’s article intrigued me as I spend quite a bit of time in meetings and discussions ofhigher education problems and opportunities at the state and university level. Often theconversation will turn to the internal bureaucratic barriers to change, the lack of funding forinnovation, and sometimes the lack of interest by the constituents who must embrace andimplement new ideas and practices. Occasionally, participants will point to a successfulprogram or process at a peer or aspirational institution; and then we muse about how thatwill or will not work here. On the flip side, someone will propose that we have a successful

Radical Democracy in Global Perspective: notes from the pluriverse

In this article we contrast the theoretical tradition of radical democracy developed by Chantal Mouffe with an alternative tradition of radical democracy rooted in the practices of subaltern social movements. While the former is wedded to the context and aspirations of Western modernity, the latter consists of place-based forms of ‘colonial difference’ within the Third and Fourth Worlds that are subalternised by the (aggressively globalising) modern tradition of democracy. Working within a ‘modernity/coloniality’ framework, we contrast these traditions of radical democracy along three main axes: 1) the logic of articulation among diverse struggles and movements; 2) the orientation towards, and aspirations with respect to, the state; and 3) the relation to the global scale and vision of the ‘pluriverse’.

Opening the black box: The adoption of innovations in the voluntary sector—The case of Indonesian civil society organisations

Despite the considerable attention paid to research into the adoption of technological innovations in the public and private sectors, little attention has been paid to such research in organisations within the voluntary or third sector. As a result, many things remain unknown: the patterns of uptake and adoption in the voluntary sector; the process of the transformation, both within the organisations and in the implementation of the innovation; and the implications of such uptake. This paper attempts to address these problems by focusing on civil society organisations (CSOs) as a subset of groups within the voluntary sector. At a theoretical level, this research is concerned with the diffusion of innovation and its effects on the practice of social movements in general, and of CSOs in particular. Using the experiences of CSOs in Indonesia, as a latecomer economy, these concerns are explored through the analysis of two related empirical issues: (i) the links between innovation and organisational performance and (ii) the construction of innovation diffusion and impacts in organisations that define those links.

Social Justice and Dispositions for Adult Education

The article identifies dispositions from a thematic investigation of the pedagogical practice of Ernesto Che Guevara and various social movements in the United States. The article outlines and places these dispositions within the context of debates over social justice and dispositions for education program accreditation in the United States that often directly impact adult education graduate programs. These dispositions are then demonstrated in historical and contemporary adult education practice. The article argues that these dispositions have increasing relevance given the growing polarization of wealth and poverty and environmental destruction facing humanity.

Dinâmica e consubstancialidade das relações sociais

Conflitos de classe, de gênero e raciais tendem a ser concebidos, interpretados e enfrentados isoladamente. A autora analisa desenvolvimentos no campo dos estudos feministas e da sociologia do trabalho que apontam para a interdependência dessas categorias sociais, tanto no plano teórico como na prática de movimentos sociais de mulheres e trabalhadoras.